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Warp: Facebook Open-Sources A Super Fast C/C++ Pre-Processor

Following Facebook's announcement of the Hack language and being one of the organizations backing the new WebScaleSQL, Facebook developers ended out last week by announcing Warp, their latest open-source contribution...

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Sounds very useful. What would be even more useful is eliminating the unnecessary parts of a header for each use case: when including a header for class Foo, most code only needs to know about public members, how big class objects are, and what the vtable looks like. Changing private non-virtual functions (not called inline) or the type of private fields (in ways that don't change size/alignment) shouldn't require recompiling most sources.

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If occulus rift is used internally by Facebook for development, you can expect nice things to come out of it.
If occulus rift is used for Facebook customers, you can expect less nice things.

A lot more to this than Occupus Rift. I am not familiar with that device, but I am intimately familar with Facebook's reputation, refuse to have an account with them and encourage others to follow the FSF advice to stay away from their online "service."

Due to the militantly anti-privacy nature of Facebook, all code coming from them needs to be examined closely by parties with competing interests. I do not have the skills to do this, but I know that malicious compilers have been made by hacking gcc as proof of concept. Probably this code will be fine, but I would wait to use it until it had been carefully done over. A compiler really has a lot of power over binaries made with it.

I have applied this same standard to Google, and myself found an issue with Chromium: no matter how you set it up, and even with Javascript blocked, it reports too much fingerprintable information and Panopticlick always identified is as "unique." This I do not regard as an accident, and induced me to uninstall Chromium over browser fingerprinting.

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A big chunk of a preprocessor job is to manage the dependencies which is a directed flow graph problem.

I would say that FB must have a couple of experts in graph algos and possibly few good tricks to efficiently work with graphs.

FB has hired experts from many fields, but the author of the tool is Walter Bright. Walter Bright is a self-taught compiler writer without a formal degree in computer science. Few years ago he did not know what higher order functions are, but he seems to know a thing or two about low level optimizations.

Of course the whole FB language ecosystem is silly. We're expecting a real module system in the coming versions of C++. The include based system is a temporary solution and almost no other language today uses that kind of legacy system. It's terribly inefficient. See these slides http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-11/Gregor-Modules.pdf

But this tool is consistent with FB's eagerness towards PHP. PHP is probably the worst of the contemporary web programming languages. I'm not saying it won't work, but it was originally designed for small scale personal home pages, thus the name. A lot of work has been required to improve PHP. It still sucks compared to other similar languages with more thought on design, written by people with more formal academic knowledge. Facebook wanted to create a better compiler for PHP. They'd have come up with a much better tool with a better language (in terms of academic language research), but they probably wanted to produce a more reasonable tool for legions of cheap and ignorant mediocre programmers from public colleges and 3rd world countries with a weaker educational system.